his brute question, in that hour
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: Pieces and parts of Edward's Rebellion years from 1927-1931. And some lead-up. Enjoy.
1. Lead Up, 1925 to 1926

**Summary: **Pieces and parts of Edward's Rebellion years from 1927-1931. And some lead-up. Enjoy.

**Author's Note: **Title from "The Man with the Hoe" by Edwin Markham.

_Dedicated to Stephanie, even if it broke her heart._

* * *

Winter of 1925 isn't very memorable even as its being lived.

Carlisle is enmeshed in his normal role as a beloved doctor and miraculous surgeon at another, of countless, bendable, hospitals. Esme takes care of their houses and entertains herself in the absence of her husband. Sometimes she even goes out of her way to be social in the arms of the community that warmed (even further than it already had, for no one could quite resist her capacity for compassion and gentleness) to her after the Orville incident.

The Orville incident itself is here and gone. The same as the man. It's a blip on Edward's radar. Handled and forgotten when he slips from society, shunned from professional circles, until he fades all together in an arrogant huff to another life for himself. Edward hadn't even cared to know that much, except he heard it from and through his companions. Even when they weren't talking about it.

His only lingering thoughts of different kind.

Of what constituted a break in even Carlisle's personal rules about humans.

* * *

It's not quite a conscious choice when he stops touching them unless it's forced.

Even when they try to pull him in, Carlisle and Esme exist in a gravitation all their own, and Edward finds himself as frequently as he is in classes at school, spending his nights alone in long, deep snow, walks through their city.

He tells them he likes the winter, but somehow he thinks he's just so accustomed to the cold.

* * *

The springs of 1926 bursts with fresh breezes and they consider moving, but don't.

Edward reads, working his way through Carlisle's library, furnishing it with purchases of his own.

He gives Esme the reason to buy more bookshelves. He gives Carlisle book recommendations on papers. He scours the papers for them, and the stands. Even in the middle of devouring them he finds himself wishing he could get lost, and yet finds himself frequently still at the mercy of the minds all around him.

It's an easy excuse for absences as well.

As much truth as it isn't.

* * *

He has yet to live down the reputation he acquired in his residency class for being the one classmate who gets fatigued at the sight of blood. Fatigued, indeed. As though it were about trying to keep his lunch down and his eyes open, and not about the want to tear a broken person into a million newer and smaller pieces, to lap at the pin prick inside their elbow where blood is being drawn.

Carlisle beams so proudly - every time some doctor comes to relay, timidly and factually, that _maybe_his sister's younger brother really isn't cut out for this kind of work if he can't stomach it - that Edward takes to avoiding him for a day or two every time the occurrences resurfaces. It does not help to have either side remind him the act is in saving the person, in saving himself.

It's simply a brick wall weakness he can't seem to push through.

Maybe that is where his restless with medicine starts.

* * *

When summer comes, he's dissolved into the Victorian Grand.

The sound of music fills the house at all hours. Differing tempo's and emotive states lingering in silent rooms, where people's daily minutiae and concern can neither be missed and yet is not focused upon any longer. He continues to expand on the piece he wrote for Carlisle and Esme right after their wedding. The piece Esme has him playing continually. It's her favorite.

He's not sure it ranks in his. But the ease it illicit in her, ripples into him from her, he would play it all day.

* * *

He still goes for walks with Carlisle when he's feeling obliging.

Prohibition is the fire topic of thought and word, but neither of them care that much.

They debate politics, the mob violence, the corrupt officials, and movements, but they're all chess pieces. The disarray of the city makes Carlisle uneasy underneath their words, and yet they both cannot avoid the acknowledgement they pass more easily unnoticed in a world that is so obsessed with itself.

**The Man with the Hoe** Written after Seeing the Painting by Millet **By Edwin Markham**


	2. Lead Up 2, 1926 Winter

_In the winter of 1926 he graduates - and drops out of the medical field._

It isn't even a full two weeks later when it happens.

Walking out in the snow on a blustery night, with Esme and Carlisle left behind, cozy and snug in the house and themselves, the sky an ominous blanket of grey that hides the stars even from eyes that could see beyond the lights of a city this size. There was a man, if a creature of such deplorable morals can be called such, and a woman. Isn't that how all the stories start?

But it was no innocent rendezvous. She'd lost a shoe and then been shoved into the alley, where she was pleading for her life with a knife pressed against the hollow of her throat, where blood beaded in fuzzy vision, and a hand crept at the thigh of her dress on the leg with the sodden, shoe-less, foot.

The street silent of needed saviors.

Empty of witness save one intrusive vampire three streets over;

With very questionable morals, even when he begrudgingly sighs from his new rest, on the alley wall. Five feet from them.

"Propriety dictates that you unhand a woman the first time she tells you no."

The women screamed, fear and anxiety flooding his head, even as the man whirled, his knife flashing and Edward remained where he was, against the wall in a suit meant for business or leisure, but most certainly not for alley's. The pittance of the man's words was lost on Edward's ears, as his gaze moved between the guttural mouth spewing and the small pool of blood lingering in the hollow of the woman's throat. It shuddered with her histrionic breathing, the humming bird of her heart.

"Leave now." Edward had looked back to the man, no forte but the hint of a growl in his voice.

"You going to make me, pretty boy? I think I take you and then come back to her."

Golden eyes narrowed on the Italian complexion not lost in the abject night darkness. Unimpressed, somehow more dangerous for the asking of the first part than the bravado of the second. His head tilted, a casual disarray of shiny bronze hair curling at one cheek, as he tilted his head once as if to beckon him onward to even trying. Especially with the near arrogant smugness hooked into the one corner of his lips.

It's easy to catch the knife flying out as the man leapt at him, ignoring the woman's next scream and the way she dashes for the front of the alley, while he moved faster than sight would give either to catch the man by his wrist. The woman crying and muttering, humiliated, terrified apologies. She's thought she was abandoning him, thought this was the only few seconds she has to run and survive. Good. And still there is the man dangling by his wrist from Edward's grasp, who comes back to his attention when _**crack **_bones in the man's leg collide with the marble of his body.

The one giving where the other does not.

It would have been a nice move if Edward weren't indestructible.

"I did give you the option-" Edward said, voice like satin over sharpened steel. The man panted, cringing, trying to flail and founder against him still, swearing as though he needed to do so more than he needed to breathe. He looked down into that face, the mind where blinding pain and deep rage tinged every thought, expect some remorse, some tiny spot of anything resembling regret or repentance.

What he got - aside from a sudden dearth of the fact this occurrence wasn't the first or even the dozenth of having happened at the man's hand, that it was a cheap parlor amusement compared to that other things the man's mind spun though, other things he had done alone and in conjunction with others hands - was the man trying to punch his nose.

Edward flung him against the wall harder and faster than he meant. The sound of impact coinciding with the sudden silence of those dark thoughts when the body slumped to the ground. Edward cringed in annoyance more than regret himself and took three quick steps to body, turning it over with a foot, so he could see the flutter of his chest rising, throat working, in tandem with the thready notes of the single heart beat left in the alley.

The man was still alive.

He was both relieved and highly annoyed.

He crouched down beside the body, eyes distracted to a single woman's snow drenched shoe. She was still running. She - Candice. She would make it home and never be out this late again, would never look back and never forget. She wouldn't join the parade of faces in the man's head. She would never know what he'd had exquisitely planned out for her. She would live. She would live in defiance of him, for all the other women and men who never had. She would go on, as she had already gone on.

Which left Edward as the singular witness to the alley again,

one devoid of needed saviors, when he reached out a hand toward the man's throat.


	3. 1927, Anywhere But Philadelphia

_1927, Anywhere But Philadelphia_

The hardest thing about leaving is how easy it is.

They tried to stop him, but he was beyond listening now.

He walked out the door without a bag or

change of clothes or

looking back.


	4. 1927, Charleston – March The Fall

_1927, Charleston – March (The Fall) _

Philadelphia was left behind in seconds, and still he waits. Another week. Two.

He can feel tenuous nature of his nine years of restraint drawing taut, but temptation stays many feet away. He does not have interact with people now. There is no school to visit, that needs to be seen walking to and from and studying for. There is no house to avoid, no longer necessary is that location to be seen leaving from or arriving as though a normal man with a normal life and normal companions.

The thirst drove his every thought and still he waited. If he was going to do this, it had to be the right way. No casual choice or blundering mistakes. The pursuit in question called itself Jonithan Parmer. By day a devout, strict parish teacher of small children, whose thoughts were rare pure and kindly to even his charges.

By night a shadow in alley's watching the length of a woman's arm, the swing of a earrings, the way a woman would lean into a car to solicit a charge. All the while this Jonithan detailed how hell had more room for them than God's Gift the Earth. He could not help thinking Carlisle's church, which abandoned him, bred more monsters than the moralities it twisted away.

Skulking and thinking were not enough. Nothing, days of nothing but rambling, and thirst, until just when Edward had been on the brink of abandoning, he'd bashed one these women over the head with a broken lamp found in his alley hiding spot.

The glass in his fingers still, and blood, blood red and think and screaming and _drip, drip, dripping-pulsing_, carving the first jagged marks into her barely-alive-but-unconscious body, when Edward had appeared.

Quieter than falling snow

faster than a thought

slamming the man off of her.

They rolled, and Edward came up holding the man's body like a rag doll as he sputtered in confused rage, flooded with fear, unable to gasp a breath. The man found Edward's eyes - he saw them, his own eyes, alabaster skin surrounding them, black and hungry, both depthless and sucking void - in the flicker of a half second before Edward buried his teeth into the man's throat.

He couldn't have hated Carlisle more than then.

When his entire body ache and sung with the hot, spicy blood which poured into his mouth. A river down his throat as he drank deeper, denying the man the right to shake or struggle, even as he tried to fight a marble statue clutching his body. When every impulse, every understanding of his body grew each longer second he drank.

He was wrong. The terms held back and stifled were so mundane and regular and beyond what Carlisle had done, what Carlisle had kept from him. When he could suddenly hear those dying breaths clearer. When his ability to consider was washed away by the frenzy of needed, at the same second as the cacophony of his mind suddenly roared to life.

Over the very edge into instinct alone, where control had never been tested to be formed, as he experienced the first waves of a pandemonium that made his first riotous experience with thoughts, and the near decade of learning to live with them, nothing compared to the onslaught that beat into him from _everywhere_, the body in his hands snapped like a collection of twigs wrapped in silk.

It was dropped when his hands had gone to his ears with a snarl.  
An impulse not even enacted once since the very first time.  
They continued to come, expanding, multiplying.  
Beating into him. Louder and faster and further.

More of them than ever before, from farther out than he'd ever been able to reach and search. More thoughts and images, clarity of understanding and depth of the lines between present thought and memory, the way they saw and how they incorporated and translated their own thoughts. Frenzy and bedlam locked in a struggle that saw him raise, trying to walk forward and staggering, nearly falling under the turmoil.

"Hey, buddy-"

Edward's face had snapped up, with a hiss at the intrusion, bright red eyes seeing clearly even in the darkness. (_There a woman was pouring wine into glasses._) A man, warmth, his heart beating so loudly, breath hitched for the hiss. (_What do you mean you won't marry me?_) He took an even step forward, a plethora of thoughts displacing and congregating with his one, that he was still thirsty. (_A dog with floppy ears, that felt like felt._) So much more thirsty for having drunk. (_Just another candy mother._) The body wasn't even drained. The body-

"-are you o-What the?"

Edward's shoulders locked, trying to fight frenzy and a million impeding minds, as he was suddenly in a foot from the man at the front of the alley, reaching out for him. (_Tell me a story. A true one. Tell me about your childhood._) His hand shook just short of touching. He hadn't meant to cross that distance, only to consider it, to understand he'd have to kill his witness. What was he thinking? Why. Why couldn't he think. Why was it so _god damn_ loud. He hadn't seen anything. (_Blue. A blanket laying on a bed, viewed through the dark, through memory of seeing it every single day for years._) He-he wasn't thinking-there were no bodies in his head.

Even if body was a generous term for the pulp his hands had created.

"Leave," croaked from between his lips. A hard, harsh request. (_She's my dearest bosom friend._) A betrayal of his own want. An impossibility when his fingers curled around the man's lapel. He smelled so good. Faintly different, earthier. (_Work and sleep. Work and sleep. Every night it's the same._) He leaned forward breathing in, as a million voices went about their business, burying themselves like ants inside his ears, irritating every thoughts and action he tried to take. (_Music from a radio being sung along with by three different people. All of them bad. All of them so happy._) Fear rolled from the man in front of him and disgust and preservation.

Edward held on to him still, staring into those eyes. (_Purple scarf and grey shoes. The black ones have too noticeable holes in them._) His own black fading, but it was too dark here, too dark for the man to tell anything. (_There was a letter being written, on crème paper with a blue ink ball pen._) This wasn't supposed to be about others. Not innocent people. Not. He shoved the man suddenly, bodily with only the hand at his lapel, with the too much force. (_God. If you're listening. I could use some help tonight._) Pain spiked and his heart beat blared even louder into the frenzy that rocked both Edward's body and his mind.

Shoved that human body, another of glass and satin and air and water, toward the open space.

"Go." Edward pleaded in an firm order. He'd had the best teacher for that fool's language.

His body, capable of perfect stillness for years, shook with will it took to stay there.

"Look I don't know what's-"

The man started and Edward's eyes, reddening more and more in the passing minutes, widened.

For self-preserving creatures, this one was startlingly oblivious to anything. But if he wanted to (_Edward took another step closer_; _a woman somewhere was reading Shakespeare_) offer himself up (_another, just a few more steps and_; _a child was laughing at her grandfather_) on the altar of that stupi- No. No. This wasn't. He had. Wanted. Hadn't been. He had to-

The alley was suddenly empty.


	5. 1927, West Virginia

_**1927 - West Virginia**_

The day after is hell.

It doesn't matter that he's all powerful, or the world's most dangerous predator - he spends it on a roof, hiding between pillars and pipes, nearly shaking with the force of the sound inside of his head. Hunger is even stronger having fed, being able to hear every foot fall, conversation and heart beat for such a greater distance. Its clogged up in his hands, pipes bursting when he clenches them and swears at the mess he makes, leaping away from it.

No one hears him, but it continues to spill across the roof, and he watches it with scalding scarlet eyes. His care for the mess is nonexistent, but his anger is blinding. The point of contention and fault squarely on the shoulders of his _father_.

The man who played God The Maker, God The Creator, God The Rules and God This Is How Life Is.

Who never once shown him how this would be - being himself, his true self. Not once from waking.

Who let him grow complacent and expectant of his power, and of his decisions being accepted.

Who let him leave without a fight, as though his were not presence important nor necessary.

Who let him be alone when all of this suddenly made more sense and no sense.

Who let him have absolutely no one else to rely on in a decade.

The rage swells in him until he rips the bracer from his forearm and throws it as far as he can.

~||x||~

He watches it arc from his hand as his stomach falls. It bounces, clatters, and falls, somewhere, he can't see. He tried to stand still, listening to the voice, letting go of the last vestige of the lies and the walls. In lands, he thinks that's the sound. Or it could be offended alley cats. There's a little girl blocks from him, _tiniest_ hands, tapping out a _very_poor rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

Her father is counting the beat beside her, holding a metronome in his hands. He reprimands her for the deviations. She would rather be on the swing set in the park, but she wants so badly to please him.

Edward swore, black and bleak, frustrated at the contrived parallels evoked by his mind, in a mix of now fluent French and Italian. The bricks beneath his hands crushed into rubble and dust. At everything being clearer in him, every thought, every emotion, every unconscionable reaction and memory.

* * *

The first while is spent in a blur.

Night and day have never mattered except as details to a ruse, and now when there is no ruse, night and day matter even less. The finite lines that seperate them fading farther from his fingers tips and his mind.

With no other option, and far more history on how to than how not to, he adjusts into the cadence of a louder cacophony, feeling like an intruder in his own mind, a dictator trying to overturn a rebellious, untouchable force.

He lingers after the mess made of his first night. He can not fix it, nor go back and prepare himself for the onslaught.

There isn't really even that much cognesance about it. There is a woman still alive. If he'd been faster, even more focused, the way he is now, maybe she wouldn't have ended up in the hospital at all. But it proves the point, that it can be done. The girl isn't dead. His intruder isn't dead. He _feels_more than he ever has before.

The second time is not as messy.

Nor as judicially impartial.

The third even less.

* * *

He doesn't know how many days (or weeks) it's been when he finds himself tracing roof tops and alleys, the way his fingers keep returning to trace, coil circled, pointer to thumb curled, around the base of his bare wrist when he's watching them.

It takes many hours, before he finally finds it, on his hands and knees, covered in grime and only just catching the spark of nearly buried silver in the nested trash layer of the alley cat that had sprinted off when he snarled at on walking into this alley.

He doesn't care, when he's picking it up, watching fur drift away on the air, holding the thing by one corner of tattered, gnawed on, laces, as though touching it might somehow burn his skin or holding it too much more might induce the necessity to rend it from existence.

It doesn't matter if it was six years ago in Cleavland or days ago in Philadelphia.

He's already lost Carlisle. He can't lose this, too.


	6. 1928, America

_**1928, America**_

__  
What is memorable about 1928 can be broken down into two sentences.

* * *

The fall is full of colors never seen, the winter is mild where it, is when it is, taking place. He notices, without noticing, walking in the snow. The springs are all alike, and people burst forth with them. The summer he wishes heat mattered, when he lays out under it watching the sky pass him by. There is much of the world to bypass and be passed by from.

The season all swirl in a happenstance, half seen and half overlooked.

They aren't a background to his life, or a linear map.

They're just echoes of another life not his now.

The same with cities and states.

* * *

It is a beginning when notice's that his human memories, ever grey and slight, have become slighter. He's sure there was something about sunshine, the heat of summer sun, on his skin, somewhere, sometime.

He wonders if he should be angry at it. He can trace all of Esme's earliest memories of this world, and the ones that came before this life for her, can remember all of Carlisle's shared memories, both of his life and of Edward's own life seen through Carlisle's eyes, with more clarity than those slipping from his ability to recall personally.

It is harder to be angry about something no one can control, even if it seems unfair to be able carry all that is theirs, present and past, when he is denied his own. He has better things to be angry about.

Yet alone, doing as he pleases, when and where he would, the anger fades.

Each day finds him cooler in the place that used to boil, the place that used to burn into him merciless and unceasing, before the lack of impetus to keep it going.

* * *

There is a blinding, obliterating, coalescing silence in the world he lives in.

One where a million thoughts choreograph a dance he is the endless, solitary spectator for, without a single half note of silence should he be near to life. And yet silence is the abject and absolute rule in his life now. It is the balance. It is the price. It is the punishment.

There is no other who hears his thoughts, and only his prey hears the few words that ever have cause to leave his mouth now. He's always been taciturn over loquacious, but the overlap of their words into his every thought against the backdrop of his own person self imposed, near vow of silence is impossible to miss. As though the speaking part of him has moved beyond him.

When Edward had taken care of his latest choice -

_a sarcastic bartender at an upscale hotel, with his fingers deep into things that left him breaking arms and shooting others for pay; and left Edward with an oddly circular memory of a beloved women with a white flower pinned in her hair and violet eyes, both laughing and crying_

- he'd stolen the man's suit and spent the night in the lobby playing sonata's on their baby grand for the first time since before leaving.

* * *

Not four weeks later, he is in Chicago.

(Chicago. Specifically. Looking for things he knows he won't find there. )

He looks regardless - in the apartment buildings that are now tiny corner offices. The room that is his first memory no longer has the same wall paper or furnishings, but the bound notebook on the desk reminds him of Carlisle's. He stares out the window he'd never looked out, before making a hasty retreat from the entire scene. It's more than a mile when he realizes he's still carrying the notebook.

That it's empty is the only reason he never considers turning around, walking down the sidewalk, with his head tilted downward toward it, turning it over and over, too fast for the poor small minds passing him to see well. Not quite listening, nor ever able to ignore, the comments where they convince themselves it's just a trick of the light or having only seen it out of the corner of their eye.

It's the better part of another day, and another conquest which has left his eyes flared glaring red of the first day again, before Edward is sitting in a tree with a pen, writing the first two sentences that will start a lifelong collection of journals, as the rejection of the entire idea of writing one, which smacks of following in Carlisle's footsteps still.

And still he writes, in slow, painstakingly correct, tilted handwriting -

_Today would have been a decade._

_I still haven't forgiven him._


	7. 1929, Arizona

_**1929 - Arizona**_

It's March in Flagstaff when he concedes to company for the fifth time.

The town still wears its first dress sloppily, like a woman who hasn't realized the strap of her dress has fallen and is still carrying on before the world. He can point easily to how, even if it is the largest one between Albuquerque and the rest of the West, it is still the railroad city grown softer and larger. The changeover to have a focus on the Lowell Observatory is not so far behind them that the strain, or the benefit of the medication, is invisible either.

He's been there almost a week, with the intention of leaving in minutes, when they stumble into his thoughts.

* * *

Edward's never regretted its ability to keep him informed, even when it is deafening. Even deafening fades into normalcy after years though. It's like standing in a pouring storm. You begin to see through the rain. He lives through the quagmire of them, almost outside of himself to be around them. It keeps him away of so many things. More than he's bargained for, too, he's realizing lately.

Faces are beginning to stick with him after each encounter.

Even more they are beginning to cloy into each encounter more strongly.

The whisper of pleaded thoughts and the roar of monsters mouth's mingled hand in hand.

He misses nothing, buried into them in ways both physical and metaphysical, feelings it as their last thought dwindles beyond consciousness before drawing off the last heart beat. He has no compunction toward understanding what the notion of feeling sick is like but he thinks it is covered in a lifetime of someone else's memories passing, disorienting, before his eyes.

Creating a funnel of self, even selves so cacophonically backward and morally rejecting. Still a self, even mired in black and choice and delight, shoving it's claws into his mind, where it lingered for days afterward. He's in the middle of another of these instances, when he hears them.

He discards the body in favor listening to their quicksilver thoughts.

* * *

Edward follows their actions and antics through the city for half the day.

They are caustic, violent and volatile. It is in how they hunt, kill, steal, destroy, fuck.

He approves of very little in any of their minds, and yet he is drawn to them regardless.


	8. 1929, California Nevada South Dakota

_**1929 - California, Nevada, South Dakota**_

_April 4, 1929_

_We are in Visalia._

_They are busy doing whatever it is they do when finally are far away enough not to hear._

_I do not know why I have followed today. I do not need them, and they do not need me. Yet here I am again today. Having convinced them I do not feel the need to hunt with them, nor having revealed to them my constitutional. They think it strange, but when they come back to find me having fed in their absence they don't care again._

_It has not been a full week and the charade is already tiresome._

_Fraser's End of the Trail is far more archaic than enticing._

* * *

_April 6, 1929_

_I was nearly discovered._

_It has been too long since I was differniating what was spoken to me._

_Our dark and leafy glade  
Bands the bright earth with softer mysteries.  
Beneath us changed and tamed the seasons run:  
In burning zones, we build against the sun  
Long centuries of shade._

_Esme would have loved the oak trees here._

* * *

_April 9, 1929_

_Ely._

_My patience wanes._

_There is nothing here I find acceptable to fitting my requirements._

_Apart and among, I alone. I can not live as either of them have chosen, nor do I approve of or belong with the others of my kind. What has he made of me? What have I? Will I one day, in desperation before centuries of silent void, relive his choice as well as his seclusion?_

_I can not die._

_I do not know how to live._

* * *

_April 23, 1929_

_Pierre._

_They are gone. I am relieved. I am distraught._

_I am alone, once again, among the silence and the screaming._

_The limestone and marble were faulty, but the dome was marvelous._


	9. 1929, Alabama

_**1929, Alabama**_

It is Christmas Eve and Edward is listening to a lecture on mercy.

Not because he needs to but because he cannot, and will not, take out his quarry before the forty three people sitting between them from where he sits in the furthest back pew corner in St. Catherine's Church. The orator is a man so despicable half his congregation, patrons of all ages and both genders, think him more hypocritical, more a demon than a vessel of God's Holy Word, for each sound that is coming out of his mouth.

What they cannot hear is that behind his every new sentence is a prayer. He is praying to his God with their faces, and far worse imagined disgust in him, begging for help on this night. He talks of charity, then compassion, love and finally draws upon forgiveness.

And in this second his find Edward, who for a moment wonders if the man's stricken expression is the whisper of seeing his death coming to him, that this is fate letting captive beg the captor for one last reprieve to breath before the blood will flow, before the whispered thought _beautiful boy_ invades in the voice of the prayer.

As Edward's snarl snaps under his breath, face hardening, the man looks away choking on his own disgust. He was heard by the person closest to him, but he ducked his head and kneeled before she could catch sight of his eyes.

The man's prayer circles back, louder, stronger, screamed into the silence of the church as the congregation waits through what they imagine is acted histrionics, and with a shuddering breath he returns to it again. His speech out loud. The one which has wandered far off the path of the notes he had written out so clearly. He breaths in and paused, stopping, and facing them and starts again. Forgiveness.

How it is about being bigger than that which beats you down, no matter how small it makes you feel or how battered you have been by it. Turning the other cheek in Christ's name, who is born this night. How forgiveness has nothing to do with who is right and who is wrong, but with simply understanding with compassion. Begging them all to look into their hearts, to the heart of their own petty darkness's, and to both find forgiveness and name those they need forgiveness of that they might release both to hands of God.

They reflected and advent services goes on as they should, the older rector taking back the floor.

* * *

Edward stayed on his knees, ruby eyes watching through bronze hair, the man's collapse into a chair.

Forgiveness was neither owed nor granted to the damned.

Yet he sat watching, sat listening to the prayer which had not ended with the speech.

Contemplated on knees and loose stitches of an overrobe, on the lighting of the fourth candle, on the offering and the blessing. Contemplated on the guilt on a dozen faces, all his infamies playing before Edward's eyes in clarified glory. A man aware of his fall from all that was graceful and good, who indulged and was tempted and tempered still, and yet begging an unanswering voice.

Tired of the conflicted man, but unwilling to be disrupt the service with standing, Edward moved his contemplation to the suspended cross, draped with decor. The last time he had studied a cross for long, when it wasn't a painting or a relic was in London. The burglary of the Guildhall and the return of stolen family property.

Family. He was not that anymore, was he?

A forgotten memory. The plucked free wrinkle.

A smattering of _nine minutes _in a collection of centuries.

They had each other and needed no other to weather any storm.

* * *

The prayer circles through all of his thoughts.

A refrain for mercy and forgiveness from a man who does not believe he will receive even the gift of being answered. But he does believe that he will be heard. That his words go up to his God. That even fallen from the path this God is listening. The prayers of sinners and stricken can always be heard.

Would it seem miraculous in anyone other than the fully damned? And is he?

His self awareness burgeons on its own being, unlike all the ones before him.

The service ends and the people straggle out, heavy laden and ready to sleep, to wake.

Edward stays kneeling. Untired, untried. Watching the praying man undress, and turn on his car.

He stares still, with glittering red eyes, at the suspended cross -

_What is mercy? Who is evil?  
When was forgiveness needed?  
Whose forgiveness does he need?  
Whose forgiveness needs granting? _

- and as the car drives away, Edward closes his eyes.

He does not believe and he does not have anyone to pray to. He does not have or belong to anyone. His hands have far more blood on them than his quarry. Forgiveness was neither owed nor granted to the damned. His forehead leaned against the pew back, a perfectly still marbel statue in the flickering candle light.


	10. 1930, Journals

_February 12, 1930_

_I cannot shake the little boy's face._

_Or humming Dodo, l'enfant do._

* * *

_June 3, 1930_

_Another city, and another._

_Still nothing suits._

* * *

_September, 1930_

_I attended her wake._

* * *

_November 27, 1930_

_A voice, from long-expecting thousands sent,  
Shatters the air, and troubles tower and spire;  
For Justice hath absolved the innocent,  
And Tyranny is balked of her desire:  
Up, down, the busy Thames_


	11. 1930, Bristol

_**1930, Bristol**_

He'll remember the rain in Tuscaloosa. A bookstore in Lewiston. The way the train sounded better in the West than East, cleaner, clearer, less chaotic in the thoughts of the people. The piano concert he tried to attend but could not sit through past ten minutes, in Medford. How people seemed more real and his self faded for weeks at a time.

How the summer wasn't noticeable, and how it was five weeks passed before he'd realized he'd passed and overlooked his twenty-ninth birthday, too, same as the one before it. He'll remember when words failed him, when it clogged every inch of him, and the music, already running, grew so deafening that silence screamed at its wake.

~||x||~

But he'll remember most Bristol in the fall.

It had been almost a month since he'd found someone.

Something was always wrong, something they said, something they thought.

Topher Kendrick was far better than perfect. Laid out on a plate of his sins, waiting for damnation. His thoughts, his actions, his words - all of them beside themselves with begging to be broken. The man he'd beaten half to death, and the women he'd thrown against the dumpster, while Edward had sat watching the scene for far longer than he could even justify on the cusp of the year's madness.

But when he had slammed the man, and himself, into the alley wall, hands digging into fragile shoulder bones and legs pinned, he could not move anymore. He found himself, through the funnel of drenching fear and rapid sure-fire human thoughts, studying the lamp light glow in the man's blonde hair. It's not even the right shade. It isn't. It's not fine, or clipped. And suddenly he feels ill. Dizzy. And disoriented. In a way that shouldn't be possible.

The blue eyes are wrong, too, not that he'll ever know what was right. The mouth won't stop moving, but he isn't listening. To it or the thoughts, flies buzzing in the redness, about a wife. She was wrong, too. All of it is wrong. All of it. Screaming inside of him and coming up with only frame of reference. Denied for so long it is undeniable, undeniably already a part and parcel of every square inch of lost thought and being.

~||x||~

And he'll remember how he felt revolted, and incapable of else, leaving a true monster, howling about a broken leg, on the floor of an alley - _still alive_.


End file.
